“The Difficultest Rigor”: Writing about Wallace Stevens

The important thing is to appreciate that the poetry is seldom an arrival at a finished thought or a "final belief," so much as a medium of mental being in which endoriented thinking finds itself disturbed by fortuitous imagining, as when firecat confronts bucks to produce the poem: "the difficultest rigor is forthwith / On the image of what we see, to catch from that / Irrational moment its unreasoning" (344-45).\n This leads toward some very suggestive areas, such as an implied ascent from noise to sound to harmony, and her contention that "At the heart of Stevens's erotic poetics lies his understanding of the role of sound" (187). Valéry's famous definition of the poem as "cette hésitation prolongée entre le son et le sens" (637) is a formula that proffers a distinction between sound and sense at the level of meaning while semi-humorously withdrawing it by the near-homophony, in French, of its two terms: such "hesitation" is not the paralysis of indecision but a productive lingering, like the energetic shuttle of alternating current or Keats's negative capability.